Agent-Ready Data Management: How Dataverse Transforms your Business
What is Microsoft Dataverse, and why should it matter to you? If you’ve ever struggled to organize and manage business data effectively, you’re not alone. Organizations today generate mountains of information in countless formats, but turning that data into something cohesive, accessible, and secure can feel like a monumental challenge.
From disconnected systems to ad-hoc spreadsheets, many businesses rely on manual efforts to piece data together—often at the expense of accuracy, efficiency, and scalability. The result? Fragmented insights and missed opportunities.
“When we started with Power Platform, we made the decision to jump directly into Dataverse as we saw it as the most secure and reliable way to store and manage our data – especially our mission critical data. It was a natural choice for us and it has worked amazingly well.”
Andreas Fauske, Power Platform lead at Lerøy
Microsoft Dataverse: Enterprise Data Platform
Enter Microsoft Dataverse, the enterprise data platform designed to simplify how organizations integrate, manage, and access their business data. As the backbone of Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dynamics 365, Dataverse provides a fully managed, secure infrastructure that centralizes and streamlines data management while ensuring enterprise-grade security, compliance, and scalability. It minimizes duplication, maintains data integrity, and enables seamless integration across applications, making it a trusted foundation for innovation. By unifying diverse data types into a structured, future-ready model, Dataverse empowers both business users and IT professionals—offering the agility to build solutions quickly with low-code tools while meeting the rigorous governance and security needs of the enterprise.
But that’s not all. With Dataverse, your data is also agent-ready—primed for AI integration and intelligent automation. By leveraging Dataverse, you’re setting the stage for cutting-edge innovations like AI-powered bots and assistants, ensuring your data is not just organized but optimized for the future.
By connecting data within a unified data platform, organizations can seamlessly integrate AI agents wherever needed, boosting productivity and leveraging their rich data sources more effectively.
Visit the Microsoft Dataverse Overview to dive deeper into its capabilities and benefits.
“Scaling innovation securely is possible, even in highly regulated environments. BCP’s experience with Power Platform demonstrates that digital transformation can be a strategic advantage, fostering growth and innovation while maintaining compliance.”
Ivan Contreras Olortegui, Lead of Cloud Center of Excellence, Banco de Crédito del Perú
Read the full Banco de Crédito del Perú story
Today’s Challenge: Buy vs Build
In today’s data-driven business landscape, organizations face a dilemma: build custom solutions or buy off-the-shelf software. This choice, is made repeatedly across departments, has led to a complex ecosystem of disparate systems, legacy applications, and ad-hoc solutions.
| Pros | Cons | |
| Build custom | Exactly what you need 1. Tailored to your business needs 2. Limited or no recurring licensing costs 3. Flexible hosting options (On-Premises vs. Cloud) | 1. High upfront costs for development, testing, and deployment 2. Longer time to value 3. Ongoing maintenance, upgrades, and support costs 4. Risk of technical debt 5. Potential vendor or key-person dependency 6. Costly to build and maintain 7. Time-consuming to deliver |
| Buy off-the-shelf software (ots) or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). | 1. Ready to use, out of the box 2. Updates and maintenance handled by the SaaS company | 1. Doesn’t meet growing list of needs. 2. Costs become high as usage increases 3. Requires subject matter experts to deploy at scale. 4. Limited integration options and API throttling |
Such a fragmented approach to data management and application development creates significant challenges, such as data silos, inconsistent information, limited scalability, and security concerns. There is a clear and urgent need for a unified, scalable, and secure data platform that can be extended to support the organizations growing need to consume data, with the support of AI agents. This is where Dataverse comes in, bridging the gap by providing seamless access to data whenever and wherever users need it.
“Dataverse provides the enterprise security and scalability we need for larger or more strategic apps and gives us the tools to handle complex data.”
Freek Matheij, Global Citizen Development Director at Arcadis
Modern Data Platform Architecture
Showing how Dataverse securely manages data from multiple sources, integrates it with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, and is readily available for Copilot Studio.
Why use Dataverse?
Dataverse provides a secure, unified, fully managed data platform that empowers businesses to:
| Key Benefit | Description |
| Connect and Centralize Data | Consolidate information from multiple sources into a single, scalable platform |
| Enhanced Security and Governance | Leverage built-in features like role-based access control, data classification, and automated compliance tools |
| Ground agents in enterprise data | Use enterprise data to give context to your agents for reliable and consistent responses tailored to your business workflows |
| Streamline Operations | Automate routine tasks and reduce reliance on fragmented systems, enabling IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives |
| Empower Makers | Provide a secure environment for low code users to build apps and workflows without compromising data integrity or governance |
| Future Ready | Ensure your data platform is future ready with Copilot/agents components to extend the organization’s ability to access insights |
Dataverse for AI agents in Copilot Studio
As AI changes the ways we work, traditional workflows are getting reimagined as business process-oriented agents. However, even as makers are building more apps and agents than ever before, the majority of enterprise data still remains untapped.
To help makers unlock the full potential of their agents, we’ve made Dataverse a native experience in Copilot Studio. Makers can access enterprise data from Dataverse as valuable knowledge to customize and extend an agent’s range of functionality. This includes line of business (LoB) data from Microsoft Dataverse and third-party data from external sources (Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow).
When incorporating Dataverse as knowledge, a customized agent is created, as demonstrated in Peppermint’s Personal Injury Claims agent demo. By integrating with Dataverse, businesses can accelerate business processes and drive transformative growth.
See what the people are saying
The following organizations have successfully leveraged Microsoft Dataverse:
- Lerøy Seafood Group: Implemented Power Platform with Dataverse to improve data sharing and analysis, utilizing the Center of Excellence Starter Kit for structured development.
- ManpowerGroup: Created a strategic workforce planning tool combining Dataverse, dataflows, and Azure OpenAI Service in just two months.
- Deutsche Bahn: Deutsche Bahn’s community of citizen developers drives innovation at scale with Power Platform to drastically reduces errors and save enormous amounts of time.
- PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC): Migrated from a legacy system to a multitenant platform using Power Pages and Dataverse, improving innovation speed and reducing costs.
These case studies demonstrate how Dataverse can drive digital transformation, foster innovation, and improve operational efficiency across various industries.
What’s next?
In our next post, we’ll deep-dive into a common scenario of point solutions developed with Excel and SharePoint, laying out the traditional evolutionary path these systems often take, and how these can be migrated to a modern Power Platform architecture that meets the demanding needs of today’s data-driven world.
If you’re ready to revolutionize the way your organization manages data, it’s time to explore what Dataverse can do for you. Ready to learn more, check out the following resources:
- Learn More: Visit the Microsoft Dataverse Overview to dive deeper into its capabilities and benefits or visit our webpage.
- Discover Power Platform: Explore how Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, and Power BI integrate seamlessly with Dataverse to drive business transformation.
- Leverage AI: Check out how Dataverse data can be turned into knowledge with the Power Platform AI Builder.
- Check out our podcast: Low Code Approach | Microsoft
